The genius of Beach Boy Brian Wilson: spiritual masterpieces built upon pop song formula
Brian Wilson was a radical songwriter who brought emotional depth to pop.
I woke up on Thursday morning to discover that the world had lost arguably the 20th century’s greatest composer of popular music: Brian Wilson. Yes, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, the band’s chief architect, who proved that popular music could be both joyful and uncomplicated (Surfin’ USA, I Get Around) yet also profound, filled with existential yearning (Surf’s Up, Till I Die).
For those unsure of the scale of his contribution, what follows is a short history of how Wilson came to re-enchant popular music in the 1960s, just as it risked being overwhelmed by the disenchanting forces of modernity.
Long before the ’60s counterculture took hold, sociologist Max Weber had already described the world as fundamentally disenchanted. At the beginning of the 20th century, Weber declared that modern life – work, leisure, even love – had become governed by rationalisation, efficiency and bureaucratic control. These forces, he argued, had stripped life of mystery, meaning and beauty.
In such an age, Weber believed, no new monumental art could emerge to restore enchantment or bind people together.
Yet, against all odds, Wilson did exactly that. Not superficially, but in a deep and enduring way, he created a body of work that re-enchanted the 20th century after the horrors of the two world wars.
Wilson was a revolutionary songwriter. But to look at many of the song titles of the Beach Boys’ early chart-toppers – the aforementioned Surfin’ USA, Dance, Dance, Dance and I Get Around – it would seem unlikely that such a band would produce a new sensibility in popular song. These songs are paragons of praise to the active leisure pursuits of adolescents in prosperous post-war America.
Although lead singer Mike Love pushed for all the Beach Boys’ songs to be upbeat and carefree, Wilson ensured that their songs contained his insecurities, doubts and longing for a spiritual connection. This is evident in many of their other popular songs of this period including When I Grow Up (To Be a Man), Don’t Worry Baby, The Warmth of the Sun and In My Room.
Mark Dillon, in his study of the Beach Boys’ music, says of In My Room: “This was the group taking its music to another level. A meditation on the self and the secret emotions young people feel, it added another dimension to the adolescent experience the group was chronicling.”
In the lyrics to In My Room, we can detect a new depth in the popular song:
There’s a world where I can go and tell my secrets to
In my room, in my room
In this world I lock out all my worries and my fears
In my room, in my room
Do my dreaming and my scheming
Lie awake and pray
Do my crying and my sighing
Laugh at yesterday
Now it’s dark and I’m alone
But I won’t be afraid
In my room, in my room
Unlike popular music of the post-war period in America, these lyrics do not concern themselves with love lost and found, or with novelty songs about sex, but rather with the solace that comes from escaping from what Weber refers to as “the demands of the day”.
This new type of song that was conceived, produced and sung by 21-year-old Wilson speaks of the night and the world of the spirit, the inner self, or to what Carl Jung spoke of as the “second self”, which he described as “remote from the world of men, but close to nature … to the night, to dreams”.
In this sense, In My Room might best be described as an incantation; a private prayer to keep the dark spirits away.
In Don Was’s excellent 1995 documentary on Wilson, I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times, unlikely Beach Boys fan and founding member of the Velvet Underground John Cale spoke of his love of this song. Cale said that listening to In My Room thousands of miles away from California, “It was difficult for me not to believe everything he (Brian) said. There was something genuine in every lyric that he wrote.”
In Steven Gaines’s racy, now out-of-print Beach Boys biography Heroes and Villains, he recounts that Gary Usher – who wrote the lyrics for In My Room – was articulating Wilson’s idea that the bedroom was a sanctuary. Usher recalled: “Brian was always saying that his room was his whole world.”
Popular singer Linda Ronstadt echoed this in the Was documentary, saying: “What a heart-rending song when you think about it, ‘I won’t be afraid’ and ‘this is the place where I’ll be safe’. They were real deep profound emotions that came out of a lot of pain. There was nothing shallow about it.”
Ronstadt was correct in identifying pain as the impetus for In My Room, as in Wilson’s life his bedroom was the one place where he could escape from the abuse and domination of his father and manager of the Beach Boys, Murry Wilson. Brian Wilson said of his father, “Dad was a tyrant, possessed of an explosive, unpredictable temper.”
Murry Wilson also was jealous of his son’s success and talent, being an unsuccessful songwriter himself.
The sentiment of In My Room, although deeply personal, resonated across the US, where for the first time, during the economically prosperous early 60s, teenagers en masse had their own rooms to retire to. Another new reality was that with the rise of affordable record players and transistor radios, teenagers could retreat to their rooms and enter into private communion with a song, no longer tethered to the family lounge room record player or radio.
Another unlikely interviewee for the Was documentary, rock singer Alice Cooper, felt a part of this new reality in the US when he first heard In My Room: “I was 15. I was the perfect age for that. Your room is your sanctuary. It’s your Batcave. It’s the only thing you own, so there’s a certain holiness to it. ‘Mom, Dad – don’t come in my room. It’s off-limits. It’s my own private world here.’ ”
In this way, In My Room articulated a new personal and spiritual reality that was part of the burgeoning teenage culture in the early ’60s in the West.
In 1963, it was not just the Beach Boys’ lyrical content that reflected a new reality in popular culture but their original sound that captured young listeners.
Brian Wilson’s compositions, which mixed rock ’n’ roll with the complex harmony of American vocal group the Four Freshmen, was an entirely new sound.
The seemingly disparate elements brought together by the Beach Boys were forged within the family. Wilson taught himself how to create blocks of vocal harmonies by listening to the Four Freshmen. His younger brother Carl played guitar and was a fan of Chuck Berry. His middle brother Dennis was a teenage surfer. Their cousin, Love, brought the rhythm and blues doo-wop vocal influence.
Although the contributions of his family were crucial, it was Brian Wilson’s self-taught ability to integrate complex five-part harmony in popular songs that made his peers stop and take notice.
To emphasise the high regard in which Wilson was held by his contemporaries, Was interviewed two key members of another famous vocal harmony group, Crosby, Stills and Nash.
Graham Nash: “He (Brian) was way advanced of what anybody was doing at that point. And I think the Beatles recognised that … this is something completely different and sophisticated.”
David Crosby: “Yeah, sophisticated is the word. They did denser chords, you know, suspensions, major sevenths and minor seven nine chords that other people hadn’t got to yet. And they did them, just tossed them off, you know, they just did it … When I heard In My Room I went: ‘OK, I give up. I can’t do that. I’ll never be able to do that.’ ”
It wasn’t just fans of vocal harmonies who detected something unusual in the Beach Boys’ recordings. Bob Dylan, who redefined the lyrical depth of popular music, once remarked of Wilson: “That ear … Jesus, he’s got to donate that to the Smithsonian.”
Wilson’s recordings were revelatory not only because of the sophisticated musical ear of their primary songwriter and producer but because they also imbued joy with pain. This fusion – of exultant harmonies with deep internal unrest – created a sound unlike anything before it.
When we talk of this sound, we are not just discussing the nostalgic pleasure of tight harmonies or catchy melodies. The sound of the Beach Boys – and it really was a sound more than any particular song – contained a duality. On one hand, it revelled in Dionysian ecstasy: the pounding drums, the elemental cries of youth, the rush of rhythm.
On the other hand, it upheld an Apollonian Bach-like order: a careful structure of harmonics, precise counterpoint, mathematical symmetry in its arrangements. This fusion of opposites mirrored what Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy called the “redemptive illusion” – a brief, shimmering moment where chaos and order reconcile and the world feels, however fleetingly, whole again.
It was Wilson who heard it all together, who layered the Beach Boys’ voices in ways that transformed California surf rock into something far more complex and spiritually resonant. He made this transcendence accessible.
You didn’t have to know Nietzsche or Bach. You just had to listen to the duality in I Get Around, with Love’s elemental bass chant grounding the song – “Round, round, get around, I get around” – while Wilson’s falsetto soared above it, delicate and unearthly.
That vocal balance, sitting within the broader framework of five-part harmony, was no accident. Wilson sculpted it meticulously, working late into the night in the myriad studios he used, splicing tape, overdubbing vocals, seeking perfection.
By the mid-’60s Wilson had stepped away from live performance entirely to focus on the studio. Unlike contemporaries such as Dylan or the Stones, who still viewed the live concert as the primary musical event, Wilson had realised something profound: that the recorded pop song had become a musical monument. It was the cathedral of post-war youth culture. And Wilson, more than anyone, understood how to reach the listener in the intimate space of their bedroom, or when they were driving in their car.
By creating countless musical monuments of his own, Wilson realised he could keep his demons away, while enchanting the world around him.
If Weber’s modern world had robbed us of spiritual immediacy – disenchanting the cosmos and replacing the sacred with efficiency – then Wilson’s records were small acts of resistance. They did not defy reason so much as reinfuse structure with feeling. Wilson built his masterpieces not with improvisation or wild experimentation but with meticulous layering.
He didn’t smash the formula; he used it to construct his version of the sacred. He captured enchantment within the rational constraints of tape reels, vocal tracks, echo chambers and EQ boards. For Wilson, as for Hans Castorp in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, recorded music offered the possibility of holding time still. The studio, not the stage, was where the ineffable could be summoned.
And nowhere was this more evident than in his magnum opus, Pet Sounds. Released in 1966, it redefined what a pop album could be. Inspired by the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, Wilson set out to create “a teenage symphony to God”. What emerged was an album of astonishing cohesion, emotional openness and sonic invention. Tracks such as God Only Knows, I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times and Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder) moved beyond adolescent yearning and into spiritual lament.
Even Paul McCartney admitted that God Only Knows was “the greatest song ever written”. The Beatles would go on to answer Pet Sounds with Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and an unspoken rivalry pushed pop music into its most creatively fruitful era.
Yet despite pushing to the limits the baroque art of modern music production, Wilson always retained his ability to combine this with simple beauty. For all his harmonic complexity and emotional depth, he knew how to write a hit.
Wouldn’t It Be Nice opens Pet Sounds with an exuberant yearning for a domestic paradise just out of reach – marriage, freedom, permanence. The lyrics are simple, tender, hopeful. But the arrangement, full of time shifts and key modulations, betrays a deeper complexity. This was not naive optimism. It was a dream built on fragile foundations.
Wilson’s genius came at a cost. Throughout his life, he struggled with mental illness – depression, anxiety, auditory hallucinations – and with a father who had been both his first musical influence and his first tormentor. Murry Wilson’s violence left scars. As did the Beach Boys’ abandonment of his follow-up to Pet Sounds, Smile. It is no small footnote that after this traumatic event, Brian Wilson retired to his bedroom for the next 10 years. But neither is it insignificant that the masterpiece that is Smile was eventually resurrected in 2004.
This is all an important part of the Brian Wilson mythos, where tragedy can be redeemed in re-enchantment and resurrection.
And because of this, In My Room is the spiritual centre of Wilson’s work, not because it is his most elaborate composition but because it is his truest. In that song, the bedroom is not just a sanctuary; it is a fortress, a chapel, a cave, a space of spiritual transformation. It is the one place where he could be alone with his demons and could dream of an enchanted future. That so many listeners – across decades, countries and cultures – have found comfort in that same room is testament to the depth of his emotional truth.
The Beach Boys’ emotional depth was never fashionable. Even as psychedelia took over, even as music became more political, Wilson continued to chase the sublime, the ethereal. He was less concerned with rebellion than redemption. Less with ideology than harmony. He was trying, always, to bring back what Weber said had been lost: a world in which the sacred still shimmered at the edges of life, in love songs, in falsetto lines, in fragile harmonies.
And now he’s gone.
Or at least, his voice is silent. But what he created lives on. Not just in the hits, not just in the accolades or documentaries, but in those private moments – when a song plays in a teenager’s room, when voices harmonise and create a spell that touches on something deep and hard to fathom. Wilson re-enchanted popular music. He made it OK to be broken, to be beautiful, to believe.
In the end, his great contribution was not technical or commercial. It was spiritual. He gave the modern world something it had forgotten it needed: depth, enchantment and wonder.
Adrian Rosenfeldt is a lecturer and tutor at the University of Melbourne and La Trobe University. He is the author of The God Debaters: New Atheist Identity-Making and the Religious Self in the New Millennium. He also worked in a record shop for 23 years and has recorded a lot of music in his lifetime.
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